Marilyn French, Novelist and Champion of Feminism, Dies at 79

Marilyn French, a writer and feminist activist whose debut novel, “The Women’s Room,” propelled her into a leading role in the modern feminist movement, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 79 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was heart failure, said her son, Robert.

With steely views about the treatment of woman and a gift for expressing them on the printed page, Ms. French transformed herself from an academic who quietly bristled at the expectations of married women in the post-World War II era to a leading, if controversial, opinionmaker on gender issues who decried the patriarchal society she saw around her. “My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world,” she once declared.

Her first and best-known novel, “The Women’s Room,” released in 1977, traces a submissive housewife’s journey of self-discovery following her divorce in the 1950s, describing the lives of Mira Ward and her friends in graduate school at Harvard as they grow into independent women. The book was partly informed by her own experience of leaving an unhappy marriage and helping her daughter deal with the aftermath of being raped. Women all over the world seized on the book, which sold more than 20 million copies and was translated into 20 languages.

Gloria Steinem, a close friend, compared the impact of the book on the discussion surrounding women’s rights to the one that Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” had had on racial equality 25 years earlier.

“It was about the lives of women who were supposed to live the lives of their husbands, supposed to marry an identity rather than become one themselves, to live secondary lives,” Ms. Steinem said in an interview Sunday. “It expressed the experience of a huge number of women and let them know that they were not alone and not crazy.”

Ms. French continued publishing novels as well as books of essays and literary criticism with the common theme of male subjugation of women, whether the arena was Shakespeare or modern history. “Men’s need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it,” she wrote in “The War Against Women” (1992).

Critics accused her work of being anti-male, frequently citing a female character in “The Women’s Room” who declares, after her daughter has been raped: “All men are rapists, and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.”

In 1992 Ms. French, a longtime smoker, was given a diagnosis of esophageal cancer and told she had just months to live. She chronicled her winning battle against the disease, which included a 10-day coma, in “Season in Hell: A Memoir” (1998).

Photo

Marilyn French in 1985.Credit
Ruby Washington/The New York Times

“I cannot say I am happy I was sick,” she wrote. “But I am happy that sickness, if it had to happen, brought me to where I am now. It is a better place than I have been before.”

Nevertheless, the disease and its treatment took such a sharp physical toll that, friends said, for a while afterward she questioned whether she should have survived. “She was in pain for 15 years but she was extremely brave,” said Carol Jenkins, a friend who runs the Women’s Media Center, an advocacy group in New York. “She fought through it, she wrote through it and carried on her life. The printed word was a source of life for her.”

In the years since her supposed death sentence, Ms. French continued to publish prolifically; she has a novel scheduled for release this fall and was working on a memoir at the time of her death. Her most significant work since her illness was the four-volume “From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women,” published by Feminist Press and built around the premise that prevailing histories had denied women their past, present and future.

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Despite carefully chronicling a long history of oppression, the last volume ends on an optimistic note, said Florence Howe, who recently retired as director of the publishing house. “For the first time women have history,” she said of Ms. French’s work. “The world changed and she helped change it.”

In recent years Ms. French struggled to get published, partly because of the gains in women’s rights she had helped bring about. “It was a source of embitterment to her and outrage to me,” said Robin Morgan, a writer, feminist activist and close friend.

Marilyn French was born on Nov. 21, 1929, in Brooklyn, the daughter of E. Charles Edwards, an engineer, and Isabel Hazz Edwards, a department-store clerk. She studied philosophy and English literature at Hofstra College in Hempstead, on Long Island, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1951 and a master’s in 1964. She was an English instructor at Hofstra from 1964 to 1968, then earned a doctorate from Harvard. She was an assistant professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., from 1972 to 1976.

She married Robert M. French Jr., a lawyer, in 1950. They divorced in 1967.

Ms. French is survived by her son, Robert, of East Brunswick, N.J., and a daughter, Jamie French, of Cambridge, Mass.

While Ms. French was pleased by significant gains made by women in the three decades since her landmark novel, she was also just as quick to point out lingering deficiencies in gender equality, friends recalled.

“She had,” Ms. Steinem said, “higher standards and higher hopes.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B11 of the New York edition with the headline: Marilyn French, Novelist and Champion of Feminism, Dies at 79. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe